What Trump Supporters Want You to Believe

Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that Donald Trump and his supporters on the deplorable right actually mean what they say and are not just spewing sound bites for fun or attention.

If that’s the case, here are some of the things they want Americans to believe:

• Vladimir Putin, an unabashed dictator who invades other countries, tramples on his people’s civil and human rights, and has the blood of Russian journalists on his hands is the proper role model for an American president.

• Disgruntled right-wingers would be justified to rise in armed rebellion if they don’t like the results in November. Because of course that’s what Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers had in mind when they set in motion more than 200 years of peaceful transfer of power.

• Hillary Clinton has a fatal illness and the national media are conspiring to cover it up. (Why have I never been invited to join these conspiracies?)

The list goes on and on, and I have not even mentioned the idea that building walls on our borders and starting trade wars with countries like China would somehow jumpstart the American economy.

Just this past weekend, the Republican governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, told the hilariously named “Values Voter Summit” that there could be bloodshed if Clinton is elected this fall.

“The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what?” he said. “The blood, of who? The tyrants, to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren.”

(Bevin was taking some liberties with a quote from Jefferson, who actually said that the blood of patriots is the “manure” of the tree of liberty, which is a better description for Bevin’s comments.)

Bevin went on to talk about Islamic extremists who threaten American freedoms. But he clearly was echoing the view of some extremists, including Trump himself, who have suggested that violence might be an appropriate response to a Clinton victory.

The Republicans call themselves the party of Abraham Lincoln, but seem to have forgotten that Lincoln took the nation to war to put down an illegitimate insurrection by Southern states who objected to his election. Maybe they just remember his suspension of habeas corpus, the kind of steel-fisted governing that Trump admires so much in Putin.

At the town hall meeting last week where Matt Lauer made a national fool of himself, Trump said he admired Putin because he “has very strong control over a country.” He added: “It’s a very different system, and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system, he’s been a leader. Far more than our president has been a leader.”

This is moral relativism in its most base form. Does Trump believe that Stalin, Mao and Hitler were even greater leaders? They had “very strong control” — even if the systems they ran were mind-bogglingly brutal. They also were, ultimately, failures. Putin is such a good leader that he has presided over the economic collapse of his country.

A presidential candidate’s health, meanwhile, is actually relevant to voters. But it’s hard to believe that Clinton’s attackers really care about that. Questioning her physical well-being is just another way to throw mud at her.

The ideas that have turned this election into such a farce are not just dangerous and appalling by the standards of American democracy and political traditions. They also violate just about every principle the Republican conservatives have been voicing since the days of Ronald Reagan, whom the Grand Old Party still claims as its icon.

The situation has gotten so dire, Politico reported recently, that former President George W. Bush told a reunion of members of his staff in April: “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.”

Actually, the Republican Party that Reagan built has been moribund since the rise of the Tea Party and the do-nothing Congress led by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. If Trump finally kills it with his conspiracy-mongering, immigrant-bashing, race-baiting and Kremlin-loving, it will just be a coup de grâce.